Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

A March to the Mountaintop

Alice Faye Duncan’s picture book tells the story of MLK’s last days in Memphis

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Alice Faye Duncan’s award-winning 2018 picture book, Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop, offers children an account of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

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Raise the Roof for Tennessee Women and Title IX

Mary Ellen Pethel celebrates the lives of 50 Tennessee women athletes

In Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee’s Trailblazers, historian Mary Ellen Pethel measures the impact of 50 years of Title IX legislation on Tennessee women’s athletics in higher education. Pethel will discuss the book at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville on March 11.

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Pursuing the Stranger Course

Novelist Charles Dodd White discusses a pivotal year in his life as a writer

During the past year, Knoxville writer Charles Dodd White has seen three books published — a feat that would be a high point for any writer’s career. In a recent email exchange with Chapter 16, he discusses how this body of work came to be and contemplates the future of his writing life.

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Europe’s Bloody Borderlands

Timothy Snyder talks with Chapter 16 about the peoples and territories trapped between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia during the 1930s and 1940s

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In the bestselling Bloodlands, which has been critically acclaimed and widely translated, Timothy Snyder argues that the systematic killings in the Nazi death camps were part of the same arc of violence as the mass starving inflicted on Ukraine by the Soviets in the 1930s and the extra-legal killings perpetrated by Germans and Russians alike during their occupation of Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. 

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Overcoming the Divide

David Dark is still questioning everything

Nashville writer David Dark has revisited his 2016 book, Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious, creating a “reframed and expanded” new edition. He’ll appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on January 7.

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Souled Out

Thomas Healy chronicles the creation of a planned Black city in 1970s North Carolina 

In Soul City, Thomas Healy tells the epic, tragic, and potent story of founding a new, Black-oriented community in 1970s North Carolina. Healy will discuss Soul City at a virtual event held on Facebook Live, on the page of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, on November 15.

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